Device labels and targets

By default, writes are striped across all devices in a filesystem, but they may be directed to a specific device or set of devices with the various target options. The allocator only prefers to allocate from devices matching the specified target; if those devices are full, it will fall back to allocating from any device in the filesystem.

Target options may refer to a device directly, e.g. foreground_target=/dev/sda1, or they may refer to a device label. A device label is a path delimited by periods - e.g. ssd.ssd1 (and labels need not be unique). This gives us ways of referring to multiple devices in target options: If we specify ssd in a target option, that will refer to all devices with the label ssd or labels that start with ssd. (e.g. ssd.ssd1, ssd.ssd2).

Four target options exist. These options all may be set at the filesystem level (at format time, at mount time, or at runtime via sysfs), or on a particular file or directory:

foreground_target: normal foreground data writes, and metadata if

metadata_target is not set

metadata_target: btree writes

background_target: If set, user data (not metadata) will be moved to this target in the background

promote_target: If set, a cached copy will be added to this target on read, if none exists